Scientists who attach video cameras to animals are usually seeking a creature’s-eye view. When Leo Uesaka stuck tiny cameras to the bellies of seabirds called streaked shearwaters, he turned those cameras around. So maybe what he captured wasn’t surprising — but the amount of it was.
“The frequency of the excretion is far more than I expected,” Dr. Uesaka said.
A behavioral ecologist at the University of Tokyo, Dr. Uesaka had intended to study how the seabirds run along the water’s surface as they take off in flight. But when the No. 1 thing he noticed in his recordings was No. 2, he decided to shift his focus. He learned that streaked shearwaters almost never defecate in the water. Yet they go more than five times an hour, on average, while flying. The finding was published Monday in the journal Current Biology.
“You’d be surprised that a paper on bird poop could be that fascinating,” said Kyle Elliott, a behavioral ecologist at McGill University who was not involved in the study.
The findings might seem to confirm the worst fears of beachgoers who have been menaced by circling sea gulls. But the droppings of streaked shearwaters, which usually forage far out at sea, are unlikely to detonate on a sunbather’s towel. They might have effects, however, on the movement of nutrients through ocean ecosystems.
Streaked shearwaters are large birds that search for fish over the western Pacific. Dr. Uesaka and his colleagues study the birds at their breeding ground on a small, uninhabited Japanese island.
For the new study, Dr. Uesaka gathered nearly 36 hours of video footage of the birds on their daytime foraging trips, and watched all of it himself. “The backside is not very interesting,” he said. “So I’m always watching the time.”
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